The lawyers who drafted the surrogate contract should have forseen this possibility and addressed it in the contract so all parties knew who got to make the decision if this happened.

I wonder if the "my body" crowd think that the pregnant woman always gets to choose even when the woman is renting her womb space in a commercial tranaction. The surrogate parents wanted her to have an abortion, but probably could never compel that, even it was in the contract. Against public policy . . . or is it?

Rather than bring a new life into this world through a surrogate, they could have adopted an existing human life with full disclosure of its physical and mental impairments. It's not even necessary to leave America in order to discover an unwanted or orphaned child.

These type situations occur more often, they just don't get media attention. It's going to get much more ugly folks. Infertility is a huge problem in our culture, and you have all types of desperate couples, from good to bad, and most in between.

Wow, what would happen if the tests looked OK and the baby looked fine but developed ADHD? Or oppositional defiant disorder, or type 1 diabetes? Would the parents sue the surrogate mom? Would they sue the physicians?

Only perfect children need apply to live? That is basically the case in Haiti. A blind friend recently went there and the locals were amazed as few had seen an adult who was blind since the children are terminated if blind.

I'm opposed to IVF. But "They should adopt an unwanted infant" is NOT an easy answer. The fact is, women don't abort because of a lack of good adoptive couples.

They abort because they want their offspring dead. They don;t WANT to give the baby away. They want the baby to cease to exist.

The fact is that it takes a special kind of mother to realize that her child's life is more important than her own selfish desire to 'make the problem go away.' And there are very few of those women in today's world.

Here's the macro issue. We went through infertility problems. This is a huge problem w/ virtually no guidelines. Both the couples and surrogates are vulnerable, and then there are the babies, often merely a commodity to be bought, sold, or dumped, like the price of gold falling. I'm a libertarian and I'm saying there needs to be some regulations. This is like the Wild West.

When choosing abortion, it may well be the intent of the mother to murder her child. However, what is known with absolute certainty is that the child is undesirable.

There is no way to prevent murder committed in secret. There is a way to promote alternatives. The problem is with businesses, including Planned Parenthood, which promote and rationalize the wrong choice.

We are discussing paradigm shifts, which is not a simple process. None of the paradigms proposed are either unique or innovative. If anything, the traditional choice is the simple choice is abortion. The traditional choice is the simple choice is money, welfare, and ego. There are consequences which must be addressed, including infertility and increased risk to mother and child.

That said, I do not know the circumstances of the couple in this story, but I resist discussing exceptions before the normal, or a complicated issue in isolation.

This seems to me to be simply another manifestation of the larger social ill of self. The focus in this case was always about what the adults wanted and not about the child. They could not have children, but they wanted "one of their own." I can't speak much to the potentially biologically driven urge to have a child of one's own biological genes, but I think it is a rationalization and not biology that drives it. Anyway, the child then becomes, as another commenter posted, a commodity. A thing. The couple wanted a perfect baby, not for the baby's sake, but for their own. So, if it fails to live up to their standards, just crumple it up, toss it in the trash and start again. Because it was never about the child.

Did they want a family? Or did they want a thing? Another glass figure on their glass menagerie of life?

I also do not know about how challenging this child's issues are, but as an adopter of 5 special needs children, I can say that there are many issues that might seem scary on paper, but when you live with and love a child, when the child is the focus and not yourself, those "needs" often turn out to be insignificant.

The good news is that there are people who value the life of the child more than themselves, the surrogate who carried it to term, and the family who adopted it. Would that humanity's focus was to encourage that more than the constant barrage of "me too" personal rights.

Deidre, my triplets were donor embryos left over from IVF. The donor couple believed that those little fertilized eggs were sacred, so they instructed the fertility doctors to not throw any away and use them for people like us.

In fact, when they thawed the little guys, they thawed three hoping two would be viable, but all three were viable. So without asking us, to honor the parents' wishes, they implanted all three.

11 years later Thomas, Lauren, and Peter will be going into the 5th grade.

So not all people who use IVF are infidels, nor are all the people like us who thank them. 8)

hmm. . . under such a contract, if the gestating mom gets an abortion (for any number of reasons -- from a fight with the contracting intended parents to a health condition), do the contracting intended parents sue for destruction of property?

God bless those DONOR parents. IVF gives couples a chance at having a child, nothing at all wrong with that. I don't understand the trend of some pro life types on the right to demonized IVF. Dierdre isn't the only pro life commenter on Althouse who has alluded to IVF in this way.

If the "right to choose" is predicated on "it's her womb," as has been said around here, then the surrogate mother would seem to be the one with this right. Can she contract it away, or is it unalienable? If she can contract it away, then couldn't marriage be taken to give the husband a say in the matter? Since this is obviously nonsense, I take it that this right is not alienable. Therefore, the real money in surrogacy would be to suddenly require a much, much bigger payment, just before the unlimited abortion deadline, if there is one. What could go wrong?

“Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?" Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course... "Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!" Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price” ― Winston Churchill